By Vishakha Dahiya:
We all come across gruesome stories of harassment of women through newspapers/magazines or social media. What we read is only a small fragment of the reality. When a child is made to study “the right to equality”, far away there is a girl watching her brother go to school while she does the household chores. Why the constitutional laws are only confined to books/courts? Why is that when a woman is harassed by her husband, she takes all the torture to herself without uttering a word? Here, I am focusing on the strata of our society where a female is considered to be a “liability” than a “responsibility”. Is the violence against women self-created? This blunt question cropped up in my mind when I came across a very disheartening incident which happened a few days back. An incident that left me feel helpless.
My housemaid is a refugee from Bangladesh. She came to India along with her husband in search of work immediately after her marriage. She is a work hardworking and honest lady. As the days passed by, we started noticing irregularities in her work. Once she didn’t come to our house for a week straight. When we inquired about her, we came across this horrifying truth which left us dumbstruck. She was admitted in a local hospital after suffering severe injuries on her head. Her drunkard husband had physically beaten her with a wooden log. After she recovered from the injuries, we got a hold of her and asked her to narrate the whole story. It was so inhumane of her husband to beat her every single night. We tried to extend a helping hand and asked her that we would like to lodge a complaint in a local police station. But she shunned us saying “Mera parivar bikhar jayega (“My family will be ruined”)”.
How are we supposed to react in such a scenarios? This is just one of the ugly truths. I wonder how many women are harassed every day by their male counterparts. To save their family and for the normal upbringing of their children, they tend to accept it all as a part of their “destiny” and learn to live with it. In a country where we worship goddesses, a female is beaten to death every now and then. This is a harsh truth which is slowly deteriorating our faith in the country’s law and order situation.
We need stringent action for the betterment of women in rural parts of the country. We need to educate them and provide them with a suitable job so that they don’t have to be dependent on any man who treats her no less than an animal. I hope for a better tomorrow where every female is treated with the respect that she rightly deserves.